My daily diary except everyone can read it.

Mystery

January 12th 2018

Today we went on a murder mystery tour of Cardiff. We’re here for the weekend for a gig, and Alice found a treasure-trail, murder-mystery, guided-tour of Cardiff online. The concept is like Cluedo, you have to find the murderer and the murder weapon by eliminating suspects. You eliminate suspects by following a list of clues that lead and direct you around the city, reading statues and plaques and solving hints and puzzles based on your surroundings. It was a really fun way of exploring a familiar city.

I spent three years in Cardiff for University, but today I got to see corners of the city that I’ve never seen before.

The trail guided us around Cardiff, from City Hall to Bute Park, to Cardiff Castle, to Riverwalk, to the Millennium Stadium.

Those are all places that I’ve been, or I’ve seen, but I’ve never really experienced. The murder mystery tour changed that. It even helped me discover my new favourite coffee shop in the entire world; Uncommon Ground in the Royal Arcade.

And the actual concept of the game was fun as well. Each clue ruled out suspects and murder weapons one by one, until Clue 20, when the true murderer was revealed.

Or, it would’ve been, if we’d done it right.

One clue took us to the ‘Trustee Savings Bank’ and said that we should rule out the suspect whose name and initials that were found on the shield above the entrance. The initials ‘SB’ were on the shield, with the words ‘Trustee Savings Bank’ written around them.

There were two SBs on the suspect list; Steve Brunking and Samantha Bowler. We didn’t know which one to clear as innocent, but we hoped that the other one would be ruled out later on, so it would thus rule them both out. But, when we got to the last clue and it was revealed Dave Herd was innocent, we were left with two answers: Steve Brunkings and Samantha Bowler. Damn.

You have to go on to the murder mystery website to submit the answer and find out if you were right. We’d figured out that the weapon was the poison, but in the end we just took a 50/50 chance and guessed that the killer was Steve Brunkings — based only on the fact that Alice remembered there being an ‘A’ in the words around the shield, and Steve had no A in his name.

Yeah, we were wrong. Samantha was the killer. We should have ruled Steve Brunking by the letters in the words ‘Trustees Savings Bank’, apparently. I mean, I can kind of see that there are some of the same letters, but I still can’t really see what pattern or rule we’re adhering to to rule out Steve. I think Samantha was framed.

Anyway, that was a fun way to spend an afternoon. In the evening we went out for cocktails at the aptly named ‘Cocktails and Coffee’ and for dinner at the more metaphorical ‘Potted Pig’.

I had to make the horrible choice between having the ‘Mustard cured, new potatoes and greens (enough to share between two)’ to myself, or the ‘Welsh rump lamb, bulgar wheat and ratatouille’. In the end, I decided on the lamb, because although the former was going to fill me up more, the latter sounded nicer. And it was bloody delicious, so I’m glad I chose what I did. Alice had a rump steak, and we both had ‘braised beef shin and cream cheese on sourdough toast’ to start with.

Oh, and we had more cocktails.

Until tomorrow, today was all about discovering Cardiff and finding new places.